Exercise and Activity
I want to preface this post by saying I am a huge advocate of exercise, preferably outside if weather conditions allow. I believe there are physical and psychological benefits to being active, and I even ‘walk the talk’: although I do not run any more, I am a notorious walker and swim regularly. I also […]
Brain and Behaviour
Last week I was aboard a cruise liner in the Caribbean. I had a lot of fun but was primarily there to participate in a kinda conference organised by low-carb advocate Jimmy Moore. I was privileged to share the stage with some very lovely and inspiration speakers, among them the US cardiologist Dr William (Bill) […]
Healthy Eating
The need for regular meals are a regularly-occurring feature in healthy eating and weight loss advice. I used to believe this myself. But in the last year or two I’ve had to reconsider my thinking on this on this on the basis of my own personal experience as well as people I’ve worked with clinically. […]
Sleep
One could argue that our health is the product of factors that can be genetic (inherited) or environmental (including diet and activity). Body weight, for instance, will usually ultimately determined by these two major factors. There is no doubt that some people inherit more of a tendency to be heavier than others. Some people do […]
Food and Medical Politics
For some time now there has been debate in some nutritional circles about the relative merits of different ‘diets’. Certainly, there has been at least two factions here. One argues for a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet which usually includes plenty of starchy carbohydrates such as bread, potato, rice, breakfast cereals and pasta. Others (including me) argue […]
Brain and Behaviour
The last few decades have seen a rise in rates of overweight and obesity. Average duration of sleep has declined in the Western world too. Could the two be connected? Actually, yes. There are a number of mechanisms through which reduced sleep time might be somehow contributing to the obesity ‘epidemic’, and these were summarised […]
Healthy Eating
I came across this report yesterday. It concerns a study presented at the American Heart Association meeting in San Diego this week. From the report it appears that overweight individuals were randomised to one of two diets for 6 months (along with moderate exercise). ‘low-carb’: 30, 40, 30 per cent of calories from carbohydrate, fat […]
Children's Health
The body mass index is a commonly used measure of body size. It’s calculated by dividing someone’s weight in kilograms by the square of their height in metres. It looks kinda ‘sciency’, but actually it’s a quite useless measurement, principally because it takes absolutely no account of the body’s composition nor the distribution of fat […]
Healthy Eating
Last Saturday the Times here in the UK published a piece I wrote about ‘intermittent fasting’. This topic has been getting a lot of press of late (the Daily Mail, for instance, carried a piece earlier this week too). I’m pleased to see that intermittent fasting is getting some attention, and there’s some challenge to […]
Healthy Eating
Earlier this month I wrote about a study in which the effect of sleep deprivation on appetite ratings in response to images of food was tested [1]. Overall, subjective feelings of hunger were significantly greater after the night of sleep deprivation. The study subjects underwent brain scanning too (functional magnetic resonance imaging). After a night […]